Left Brain Right Brain

Before Xmas, I wrote a post about how autistics use interfaces. I noted in that article that the things I had seen so far couldn’t be representative as they were only what I haad observed in my daughter Megan.

To that end I have recently been chatting online to a couple of groups of people who are autistic in order to try and get a sense of how we as web designers could better meet their needs and to develop a rounder picture of the nature of the interface related problems an autistic may face.

Firstly some definitions. The people I have most recently spoken to are mainly Aspergers (please note: they do not have Aspergers – ‘having’ implies illness/disease neither of which Aspergers is), whilst some (and my daughter) are classically autistic. There are differences in these two states of being but the basic underlying issues are the same – they are both Autistic Spectrum Disorders which are rooted in the same set of root difference.

During our discussions, the main issues raised were:

1. Short Line length
2. Colour combinations (light on dark is very bad)
3. Imagery/Animation
4. White space (rivers of white)
5. Small text blocks
6. Backgrounds must be solid, not patterned
7. Single, long pages broken into small sections rather than lots of individual pages

You have to be careful in these circumstances to differentiate between personal preference and a genuine trait for all people who follow a certain diagnostic criteria. The above list is comprised of things that were mentioned by more than 2 different people.

First of all is my piece of humble pie – imagery and animation. Autistic people have no great preference for graphical interfaces with a few indicating a definite preference for textual interfaces and the majority indicating they are happy with either. At this time then I’d say that my observations of my daughter and subsequent conclusions are more relevant to her age rather than her autism – kids like pictures and animation.

Colour combinations for autistics can be tricky. Autism is heavily based around sensory difference and hence some autistics actually ‘hear’ colour (or smell sounds etc etc) and hence some colour combinations can in some circumstances be actually physically painful to some autistics. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any one colour combination that is espcially bad (or good) as, like all of us, autistics have personal preferences regarding colours. I do think though that more research in this area may reveal an autisitc ‘swatch’. This would require a more structured program of investigation though.

Autistics by and large follow NT (neurotypical) preferences in the area of line length, hence the following would be applicable to autistics as well:

Both children and adults had definite preferences. No adults chose the full length as their favorite. Most chose medium length, and narrow length was not far behind. For the children the full length was also the least preferred, with a strong preference for the narrow length.

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/feb03.asp

Autstics indicated a definite preference for strong, wide margins preferably in white to any areas where there was textual content and textual content on one subject should be on one (long if neccessary) page broken into small paragrpahs rather than long unbroken blocks of text spread across many pages.

Backgrounds should be solid – even a slight pattern in a background causes the page to ‘swim’ badly – remember, autism is primarily a perceptual and emotional disorder.

One of the most interesting aspects of my discussions with autistic people is their opinions on branding. Simply, they all acknowledge its there but make no emotional link with it at all. In a lot of cases autistic users find it distracting and puzzling. Especially where (for example) a logo carries a device as well as the name of the company. Most autistics struggle with metaphor and seem to find it offputting in this setting.

So what can we do to make our autistic users browsing easier? Firstly it seems we can apply a lot of the rules of good design backed up with both WCAG (although AAA may not be possible bearing the desire for smaller line length and hence a probable fixed width) and standards compliant markup. The two areas of potential difficulty that I think need more investigation are branding and developing an autistic swatch (swatches). It should be straightfoward to provide technical solutions to these issues using CSS but firstly we need to further develop these two areas with more focussed investigation.

Superb idea over at Benjamin Adam.

The May 1st reboot is usually swamped by Flash designs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some standarsd based CSS designs in there? I thought so, so I signed up. Better get working on some concepts after the next issue of Project: New I guess!

I posted here recently that Dean had made comment on the IE blog that they would soon be addressing once and for all what the new version of IE (IE7) would do in terms of supporting web standards, in particular CSS 2 and XHTML 1.0.

There’s been nothing explicitly said so far but there have been one or two just-below-the-surface mutterings in slightly related postings.

Today, for example, Dean made a post about the new Netscape beta and paid particular attention to its ability to switch rendering engines which he thinks is a good thing.

Here’s his closing statement:

I look forward to trying the Netscape beta and having pages work the way they do in IE. I’m happy to see another browser built on top of the IE platform to go along with NetCaptor, Maxthon,

Now, is it just me being over-paranoid or does the phrase I look forward to trying the Netscape beta and having pages work the way they do in IE. sound worrying in relation to what a new IE might do to anyone else? It read to me like a warning shot that this dual-rendering ability was going to absolve the IE team from making their rendering engine conform to web standards. At the very least its a disappointing solution on Netscapes part to cater for a browser that doesn’t work very well. At worst it could be the excuse the IE team need to not fix the IE rendering engine.

Or am I being overly paranoid here?

There exists a group called CAN (Cure Autism Now) whose primary aim must be fairly self evident from their name!

They’ve recently started a section on their site where parents can upload images of their autistic kids with a little bit of text attached. here’s a sample.

Aaron is the light of our life, we are so lucky to have him.

Huh? They are lucky to have him? Then why do they want to ‘cure’ him? Seems a more accurate statement would’ve been:

‘We are lucky to have him’ so we want you to donate money to CAN so we can help make sure people like him aren’t born in future.

I’d rather see parents channelling their efforts into raising awareness and tolerance. Not this. This, to me, verges on eugenics.

First, take note, this isn’t about a method for how autistics learn but more about the differences in the difficulty of learning for both NT and autistic people.

Michelle Dawson recently pointed me to a thread where a discussion was taking place on the nature of ‘learnability’ (is that even a word?). And an NT parent asked Michelle for advice on how to help her child who was self-harming. As part of her incredibly helpful answer she linked to an essay on autistics.org on how autistics aquire (and maintain) skills. Its a truly fascinating piece of writing and an insight on how hard autistics fight to try and conform to how the general public feels they should behave.

Some autistic people…. have to do things like decide to look at something, see a garble of shapes, start differentiating individual shapes, focus in on one of the shapes, figure out that the shape is a Thing, figure out what the Thing is, and figure out what the Thing does. And that’s all just to get to the bare minimum of what NTs do automatically, and it’s leaving out things like differentiating one sense from another and doing this in a non-passive setting.

As Megan’s parents we’re aware of how hard she finds certain things but we also felt, as most NT’s do, that once a skill is learnt it stays learnt. Thats why when Megan forgets to use the toilet sometimes its frustrating for us – but we forget about how difficult it is for Megan to keep up the semblance of normality that even beginnig to make such a decision entails.

Back to Michelle’s post, she says:

Most autistics are very, very patient. We will communicate a basic need ten, twelve times. This may happen over a long span of time, as the basic need we are trying to communicate gets more and more pressing and becomes complicated by more recent difficulties. At some point, we will blow up…….This then becomes the *one* behaviour everyone notices (and also the one behaviour a behaviour analyst will analyze). Then everyone looks for what happened just right before this unacceptable and unexpected (where on earth did that come from??) behaviour. Then they decide what the kid wants, or what he means, according to the one and only behaviour they have noticed. They then work to have the child communicate appropriately what they have decided the child was communicating at the point the child blew up.

We are sometimes guilty of this – you can sometimes see the frustration on Megans face as she tries to let us know what it is she wants and its the singe most helpless feeling in the world to see your child trying to tell you something important to her and you not being able to decipher it. Sometimes we have to end up guessing and its wrong a lot of the time and Megans has a tantrum borne out of pure frustration. Its our biggest wish for Megan that we or her could find a way to each other so we can meet her needs better. She has speech therapy and is beginning to use a pictoral timetable at school and to a lesser extent at home but other than that – its guesswork.

So, thats our holy grail. Its also a large part of the reason why I started listening to autistics in these matters as oppose to ‘experts’.

At the end of last month, Martin was wondering what happened to old designs:

What also happens to all the great designs that last just a while before their owner get an itchy mouse finger and decides to redesign. Some of these sites deserve to be seen a little more than they are. There are some sites that seem to have changed everytime I go back – and yes they are more often than not an improvement. But what happens to the old design?

Its a good question. And so, in that spirit I’m going to release an old design into the wild. The site I designed it for suffered from that most pernicious of designer problems: never really getting round to it.

The design is live here for you to have a look at and decide if its something you fancy. I ain’t going to make anyone jump through hoops for it – email me and the first person to get through gets it. One proviso: No hate sites or sites that promote intolerance can be used with this design. If I check on what you’ve done with it and there’s a hate site up there I’ll feel obliged to tell you to make the design available for someone else to use. Anything else (including porn, blogs, adult humour, whatever) is fine by me. Its valid XHTML, CSS and passes A/508 compliance. Integrated style sheet switcher included but I’m afraid I’ve misplaced all my PSD’s – the main image is from stock.xchng though so you’ll have no trouble mocking it up again.

First up Absolution Gap by Alistair Reynolds.

This is part 3 of the Revelation Space trilogy and thus the concluding volume in what has been a truly epic Space Opera in the grand tradition of Sci-Fi. It wraps the existing storyline up very neatly, gives us a few nasty surprises along the way (but no spoilers here!) and introduces another level of desirable complexity on what was already a pleasingly complex (but not overly complex) storyline. If you like your Sci-Fi grand, epic and story-driven then this series is for you.

Next up is The Way The Crow Flies by Anne-Marie McDonald (please note: link goes to Amazon.com not .co.uk).

This is an exceptionally well written book revolving around (at first) eight year old Madeline whos Dad (a Canadian Air Force officer) has just been posted back to Canada. By turns funny, touching, horrifying and tense this is a book that reminded me very much of Peter Straubs Koko which is another novel with really well drawn characters and a sad yet always engaging plot.

I’ve never read anything by the author before but I’ll be looking out for her back catalogue from now on!

After talking to the wise people on Autistics.org and Aspies For Freedom who have the dual benefit of both being on the spectrum themselves and in some cases having kids about Megans age on the spectrum, we’ve decided to give Melatonin a try.

Melatonin is not so much a drug as it is a hormone. Its produced naturally in the body and regulates sleep in all of us. We have lots as kids and production tapers off as we get older.

Its thought that up to 80% of kids with autism over-secrete Melatonin…

triggering a chain of hormonal and biochemical reactions affecting opioids and neurotransmitters that act on the brain. Yet some studies have observed that nightly melatonin supplementation in children with autism and other neurological and developmental disorders appears to improve sleep patterns in up to 80% of these children.

http://www.gsdl.com/home/assessments/finddisease/autism/melatonin.html

Sounds odd doesn’t it? That increasing Melatonin supply to an apparently over-secreted brain should help it, but it seems to work well for lots of autistic kids.

So, we’re giving it a try. Megan doesn’t really respond much to the Vallergan she’s been on since the age of 3 any more so we thought it was time. Besides, I’m much happier giving her something that is produced naturally in the body and that the body is wired up to deal with than giving her something that isn’t produced naturally.

Guess we’ll see how it goes.

Keep your eye on the IE Blog. Dean has said that:

I wanted to recap the main themes I read in the comments and use them as a roadmap for the topics that we will post about over the next few weeks….snip…. 3. Standards, standards, standards… say something!…snip…

So, keep your eyes peeled because we’re going to find out soon, one way or the other!

Version three of Googles toolbar beta has the ability to rewrite your page. A friend of mine who’s very wise in the ways of anything search related has written the following. He’s Liverpuddlian so imagine this in the voice of Paul MCartney ;o)

“Ever since Google released version 3 of its Toolbar last week, there’s been a growing storm developing over one particular new feature; AutoLink.

Admittedly, I’ve been following industry reaction with an, ’… it’ll all blow over attitude’… afterall, Microsoft tried writin links into our pages with its ‘Smart Tags’ technology some years ago, then withdrew it.

(Incidentally, the guy responsible for Smart Tags now works at Google… and yes, apparently it’s his brain behind AutoLink too!)

Anyway, was thinkin about the bigger picture last night and started gettin quite angry about it all. There are several contentious issues as I see it…

Advertisin largely exists because of content (to hook onto). TV is the obvious and simplest comparison; The channels seek to commission content that’ll attract a sufficient audience for advertisers to target. It’s a one-way deal in a sense because the writers don’t have a say on what type of advertisin goes with their works, but they in turn however, enter into that understandin as part of their fee/contract. Similarly, the audience have no control as to what advertisin they will see.

The web however, is slightly different in that the publisher (us), up till now, had control over whether advertisin would be shown at all. Furthermore, if we do choose to serve ads in the hope of financial gain, a decent ad-provider allows us to exercise some control over what type of advertisin is delivered around our content – This is quite a good and fair exchange of services ‘cos it means we can make the overall content relevant, ie… content + ad symbiosis. Plus, various browsers like Maxthon allow the user to block ads with various degrees of control. So all in all, there is an exercisable choice throughout the chain.

So what’s this got to do with Google(G)? Well G now has the largest share of publically accessible websites in its database – That’s content you and I wrote. That’s content indexed by G with our implied permission by default… in other words, they take without askin first. They then scrape and serve a modified version of it from their servers and also display our pages in their full entirety in its cache (modified). They’re profitin from our content by servin ads next to our content. They (arguably) aid and abet others who use either its free API (for developers), or its general index to steal and re-use our content as their own, which… G indexes again! (‘er… more ads over here pls!’).

Now, ya know, we’re already in deep legal waters here really but now we have AutoLink; The feature within v3 of its toolbar that rewrites our content to kindly display links to external sites it feels we’ve “missed out”. Now, AFAIK, even the most basic Statutory copyright clause includes the ‘Not reproduce or alter without express permission’ paragraph?

(NOTE: I haven’t even mentioned Adsense – A recent French Court case ruled that G had to stop others bidding on the Appellants trademark name in its Adsense network)

Ironically, G despises SPAM – It works its algo to try to defeat it afterall!! It also acts upon DMCA notices. Basically, it doesn’t want you to do what they do. But if ya do, they at least don’t want you to do it on, or from, “their” (scraped) “property”.

OK, I did say I was thinkin about the bigger picture. Up to now I’ve basically just repeated the common rants people have regardin G; copyright and SPAM.

For the bigger picture however, we need to look at the other parts of its business too. Some of you may know that last mth (Jan 05), G imposed an Adword restriction basically aimed at reducin the number of affiliates advertisin the same product for the same merchants. There are some valid reasons for doing this but I’m lookin at the bigger picture here, ie… the effect. One of which is that it undermines the whole affiliate business model and places a huge burden on merchants to somehow take-up the slack.

Movin on, G introduced a pop-up blocker in v2 (I believe) of its toolbar. Again, you can argue valid reasons for doin it but once again, its effects were felt by affiliates and merchants.

Movin on, G launched Froogle as a central “repository” for businesses to ply their wares so to speak.

Movin on further, G is workin on developin Local Search – Again, valid reasons for doin so but the effect will make it harder for legitimate “outsiders” to target that market.

Movin on more, GMail! (Somehow, they’re managin to persuade folk that Google-controlled spam is good).

Movin on (to admittedly shakier grounds), there is the belief that newly-launched sites enterin the competitive commercial SERP’s are being “Sandboxed” until quality is affirmed.

Now I dunno, but it seems to me that they’re almost tryin to “funnel” the pathways into which advertisers can sell their goods, ie… Whilst they “deny” the uses of some delivery channels, they’re makin others available, except under their terms.

But here’s the punchline: Where G can’t persuade webmasters to display their ads on our sites, G will now write links into your pages – client-side (via the toolbar) – regardless! Thus providin another channel for its advertisers and, once again, under its terms (Note: At the time of writing this, it has to be said that G has denied it has received, or asked for, any money from the beneficiary sites that AutoLink currently points to… but the feature *is* still only beta).

So lets look at how just one example may typically, and wholly plausibly, play out for the vast majority of webmasters out there.

You build a rich and informative resource. Your passion for the topic means that you’re current, and you know who and what matters. You don’t wanna steer your visitors a bum lead so you prefer to have control over where, and what people should consider. Therefore, you choose not to have 3rd party ads served from outside. You provide direct links, whether an affiliate link or not… doesn’t matter really, to external sites of worth. Your site is a natural authority and regarded highly by the community as one that’s trusted.

Along comes a visitor with the toolbar installed and where once they would’ve been clear, now they’re confused. Maybe G wrote a link that gives your visitor a bum steer. Maybe it just writes even more links on your page that not only eventually arrives at the same site you already have links for, but they’re also misleading and slower. Misleading because the status bar shows a link to Google (its proxy tracking server) and slower because the user has to go through *it* first.

If your site is financed by an affiliation, now it’s sufferin. If you happen to also be one of the affs that now cannot bid on adwords, then you’re startin to feel like someone’s tryin to put you out of business. If you’re a merchant reliant on affs, you’re probably not-so now. If you’re just a small but successful online distributor in your own right, your competitors may now be using *your* content to show *their* links on *your* pages.

It all makes me start to wonder, who’s spammin who here?

… and legally, who has editorial control? Who ultimately has responsibility for breach of contract (Links are rewritten client-side don’t forget!)?… Does Google even care now they have deep pockets?

In the future, will G close other commercial avenues outside of its control and then introduce other replacements under its terms instead?

What’s happening?

I’m not convinced we’ll ever find out given that they’ve rarely, if ever, stated the rules AS FACTS (instead of void inference).

… And given that whilst they’re buildin its empire in spite of the rules of law… And whilst they’re basically achievin all this by basically usin the same techniques as SERP spammers (but better)… One conclusion you might draw is; ‘… If they’re spammin and puttin me out of business. And if I’ve always strived to stick within the vague guidelines they give, so as to avoid being seen as, what they consider to be, a spam site, for fear of death. And if all that effort is now workin against me, then I might as well do what works for G… SPAM! SPAM usin other peoples content!”

Its pretty bad behaviour on Googles part IMO. Fortunately, one of Mikes friends at <searchguild has already written a bit of Javascript to kill this if Google decide to proceed beyond the beta with it.